When the Whistleblowing in the Australian Public Sector report was published eight years ago, one finding stood out: the federal bureaucracy, long lauded as effectively corruption-free, was seen as far from it by its own staff. The most commonly witnessed malfeasance was nepotism. One in three public servants said they had direct evidence of unlawful recruitment or promotion decisions.
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This isn't to say the Australian Public Service's corruption problem compares with government bureaucracies in most parts of the world; it doesn't. The practice of "jobbery" – using a public office for personal gain – is far more common elsewhere, particularly in the developing world. One obvious indicator is the very low pay that public servants in some countries receive; they don't mind, because the opportunities to collect kickbacks make up for the wage shortfall. Collecting bribes is itself a near-inevitable consequence of needing to pay a bribe to win a government job.
In Victorian Britain, the scourge of jobbery led to the Northcote-Trevelyan report of the 1850s, which became the foundation of Westminister public services such as ours. At its core was the requirement that all government employment decisions be based on merit, and be able to be proven to be so. The APS's commitment to merit has served it well for a century and kept it relatively "clean". However, the whistleblowing report showed that even the APS is imperfect and must protect vigilantly the status of the merit principle.
The temptation of nepotism will always threaten the public service's integrity. However, another threat to merit has emerged in recent years. As this newspaper reported this week, government agencies openly defy merit laws by demanding that prospective recruits already hold a security clearance. That is, government jobs are, in effect, regularly offered only to public servants or former public servants. This is not only unlawful, in that such opportunities must be open to all members of the community, it violates the core moral principle of our public service.
It's also plain foolish. At a time the bureaucracy's leaders are urging public servants to "widen their nets" by recruiting staff with academic or business experience, APS agencies are opting instead to fish from smaller labour ponds.
Nonetheless, government agencies have been goaded into doing this. Tight budgets have left them with little choice but to hire temporary rather than permanent staff, lest priorities change. Indeed, Public Service Commissioner John Lloyd has encouraged them to do this. Yet this has amplified the disincentive of waiting months for a recruit to be security-vetted, especially if the vacant job is only for a year or so. Merit, in this scenario, is dismissed as an impractical hurdle.
Sadly, it's unlikely much will be done to crack down on these violations. The cause is the modern over-reliance on security vetting, which was once rationed but is now a requirement of almost every government job. It's not that vetting is actually needed; an alternative is to manage effectively access to classified government information, which should happen anyway. Nor does vetting avoid damaging leaks (just ask Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, who both held security clearances).
But in a paranoid age, where few are willing to say no to any security measure, no matter how useless or costly, the zeal for vetting will continue to trump merit, whatever the law says.
